Visualizing and Analyzing St. Lawrence University Registration Data

Kassandra Wood1


1 Department of MATH/STAT/DATA/CS, St. Lawrence University

About The Data

St. Lawrence University registration data currently spans from 2014 to 2022. With around 2,250 students enrolled on campus each year, there are many disciplines, course options, and routes to take for new students. This data contains all of those choices students have made in the past in order to better understand enrollment at St. Lawrence University.

Data Snippet

course reporting_year yearly_enrolled fall_enrolled spring_enrolled
CS-140: Intro to Computer Program 2014 144 72 72
CS-140: Intro to Computer Program 2015 147 75 72
CS-140: Intro to Computer Program 2016 149 77 72
CS-140: Intro to Computer Program 2017 172 94 78
CS-140: Intro to Computer Program 2018 190 120 70

Goals

  1. Visualize enrollment from 2014-2022 by reporting year and semester.
    1. Visualize enrollment by course.
    2. Visualize enrollment by discipline (subject).
  2. Visualize open seats in courses by reporting year and semester.
  3. Strengthen overall R-language skills through encompassing this within a shiny app.
    1. Create an interactive and easy to use app for public use.

Wrangling The Data

Issues Addressed in the Data

  • Cross-listed course enrollment refers to the combined total enrollment of all cross-listed courses.
  • COVID-19 section numbers are off, therefore Fall 2020, Spring 2021, and Summer 2021 are omitted from the data.

App Figures

Graphing enrollment over the years by semester. Sections are included cumulatively and labeled.

Figure 1: Graphing enrollment over the years by semester. Sections are included cumulatively and labeled.

Graphing enrollment by discipline and grouped by level of course. Math enrollment is shown in the graph above.

Figure 2: Graphing enrollment by discipline and grouped by level of course. Math enrollment is shown in the graph above.

Visualizing open seats in courses. This graph depicts enrollment compared to the capacity of the course.

Figure 3: Visualizing open seats in courses. This graph depicts enrollment compared to the capacity of the course.

Constructing The App

These graphics have been placed in an interactive shiny app, where the user has many options to visualize data. The user can choose many things depending on the tab of the app that they are using:

  1. The user chooses whether they want to view the graphs by year or by semester.
  2. The user may change three different settings that will change the course options:
  • Select the Subject
  • Minimum Course Capacity
  • Minimum Years Offered
  1. Then the user may choose the course they would like the display on the app (these options will be limited due to the settings chosen above)
  2. The user may choose to omit COVID-19 years.

An example of the UI is shown below:

Next Steps

  • Predicting enrollment in future years based on previous enrollment of prerequisites.

Acknowledgements

  • I would like to thank Christine Zimmerman for providing the dataset.

  • And I would like to thank Professor Matt Higham for advising me throughout this process.